My Family and Other Animals

The new villa is perched on a hill, surrounded by olive groves, orchards, and vineyards. It has a small fenced garden and looks very elegant. Gerry soon becomes interested in the praying mantises, many of which are huge. They fly in the house at night and are very aggressive and entirely fearless. The house is also populated by geckos that hunt in the house at night.

One gecko that Gerry calls Geronimo hunts often in Gerry's bedroom. He's aggressive and won't let any other gecko in the bedroom. When he attacks other geckos, he goes straight for their tails, which drop off as a defense mechanism. Every night he scuttles up the wall from his home in the flower bed, enters Gerry's room, and enthusiastically settles himself in his favorite corner to wait for his dinner to arrive. He hunts lacewing flies, beetles, and moths, and does so ferociously. He is also able to scare off the mantises until the night of the "great fight."

Gerry is very interested in the breeding habits of the mantises and is thrilled to discover a very large female with a distended belly on a walk one day. When he catches her, she closes an arm around Gerry's thumb and makes him bleed. Gerry carefully catches her again so she can't hurt him, carries her home, and installs her in a cage in his room. He names her Cicely. When her belly is huge, she somehow escapes. Gerry notices her flying around one night and watches a look of fury come over Geronimo's face as Cicely lands near him.

Geronimo begins angrily stalking towards Cicely. Cicely spreads her wings and turns to face him, which confuses Geronimo for a moment, but he finally decides to fight. He lunges at her and bites her thorax, she grabs his hind legs in her claws, and they stagger on the wall. Gerry considers interfering, but the fight is very interesting. After struggling for a few minutes, Cicely jumps off the ceiling but doesn't plan for Geronimo's weight. They fall onto the bed, and Gerry hops off. Cicely finally makes her fatal mistake: she grabs his tail, which Geronimo promptly drops. Geronimo takes the chance to chomp on Cicely's head, and she soon dies. Geronimo allows Gerry to clean his wounds and then heads for his garden bed.

A couple weeks later, Geronimo allows another small gecko to join him in Gerry's room. One afternoon not long after, Gerry discovers two massive toads. Delighted by them, he races back to the villa with one in each hand and shows them to Mother and Spiro. Spiro promptly turns green and vomits outside, while Mother assures Gerry that the toads are lovely but not everyone agrees. The rest of the family has reactions similar to Spiro's, so Gerry cages the beasts in his room. That night, he lets the toads out to hunt for insects. Gerry throws a magazine at a large moth that landed next to Geronimo's friend, knocking the gecko off the ceiling. One of the toads snaps up the gecko, and Gerry feels horrible.

Gerry shows the toads to Theodore on Thursday. Theodore proposes that the toads may be between 12 and 20 years old, given their size. He feeds one a worm and watches it shove the wriggling worm in its mouth with its thumbs, explaining that he loves watching toads eat worms—it reminds him of conjurers that pull ribbons out of their mouths. He wonders if he could teach toads to swallow blunt swords.